Already I have noticed you begin to
speak through your nose, and with a drawl. Pray, if you really did
make any poetry to-day, let us hear it in that kind of utterance!"
"Coverdale has given up making verses now," said Hollingsworth, who
never had the slightest appreciation of my poetry. "Just think of
him penning a sonnet with a fist like that! There is at least this
good in a life of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out
of a man, and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him. If a
farmer can make poetry at the plough-tail, it must be because his
nature insists on it; and if that be the case, let him make it, in
Heaven's name!"
"And how is it with you?" asked Zenobia, in a different voice; for
she never laughed at Hollingsworth, as she often did at me. "You, I
think, cannot have ceased to live a life of thought and feeling."
"I have always been in earnest," answered Hollingsworth. "I have
hammered thought out of iron, after heating the iron in my heart! It
matters little what my outward toil may be. Were I a slave, at the
bottom of a mine, I should keep the same purpose, the same faith in
its ultimate accomplishment, that I do now. Miles Coverdale is not
in earnest, either as a poet or a laborer."
"You give me hard measure, Hollingsworth," said I, a little hurt. "I
have kept pace with you in the field; and my bones feel as if I had
been in earnest, whatever may be the case with my brain!"
"I cannot conceive," observed Zenobia with great emphasis,--and, no
doubt, she spoke fairly the feeling of the moment,--"I cannot
conceive of being so continually as Mr.
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